1. Other watches
The earliest form of mechanical timekeeper made use of a cord wound round a drum with a weight fixed to the loose end. As the drum is turned, the hands of the clock rotate. In order to regulate the speed at which the cord unwinds, the mechanism incorporates an “escapement”, a device which stops and releases the wheel at regular intervals with an audible “tick-tock”. Clocks like this could not easily be moved but were ideal for public buildings or for shelves in a domestic interior where they occupied a fixed location (see the brass “lantern” clock in Gallery 38, Founders Collection). Portable clocks and watches were made possible with the invention of the coiled watchspring in the mid-fifteenth century. This spring is tightened with a key and as it unwinds, it turns the hands on the dial. Because a coiled spring exerts increasingly less pressure as it unwinds, all clocks and watches which operate with a spring make use of a device which ensures that the hands will not turn more slowly as the spring runs down. The stop-start effect of the “escapement”, meanwhile, prevents the spring from instantly unwinding.

The earliest surviving watches, which date from the first half of the sixteenth century, are either drum-shaped (like nos. 2 and 3 in the wall case in Gallery 52 Silver & Watches ) or ball-shaped (no. 1).
At first, they were carried by a cord round the neck but with the growing popularity of pockets in the seventeenth century, they began to be carried in the pocket and were secured to the owner’s costume by a chain. Women carried them like a bunch of keys, suspended by the chain from a belt (see the two mid-seventeenth century portraits of Hester Tradescant in Gallery 38 Founders Collection).

German Sperical Watch, Anon.

2. The watch in art

The use of the watch became widespread in the course of the seventeenth century. It appears with great frequency in Dutch and Flemish still-life painting as a symbol of passing time. Flowers which quickly fade appear alongside watches, often attached to the blue ribbon by which they were then suspended. There are nine paintings in the Ashmolean’s collection of still-life paintings which feature watches, that can be seen in Gallery 57 (Dutch & Flemish Still Life Paintings).
Sometimes the watch itself was fashioned as a symbol of mortality (see the skull-shaped watches nos 42 and 43 in the display in Gallery 52 (Silver & Watches) and brightly coloured flowers often decorate the enamelled cases (for example: nos. 81 to 84).

Detail of Jan Philip Van Thielen's

Still Life of Flowers c.1660